Continuity and Change in North Scituate

Continuity and Change - North Scituate

(The following article quotes from the the Secretary's Report of the North Scituate Beach Improvement Association for 1906 – 07.)

The membership of the Association has risen to 336 in number ... nearly three times our original number of ten years ago - 115.The Street Lighting service has been enlarged during the past year, the number of lights and the length of the lighting season having been increased....

The Street Watering Committee secured subscriptions to the amount of $334, and the work of watering the roads has been effectively done.

The conditions of the village from a sanitary viewpoint have been constantly watched, and in some respects have been improved.

The beach has been kept clean by the Association; roads and sidewalks have been improved, in some cases directly by the Association, in others indirectly through its efforts with the townspeople and the officers of the town; and, largely through the exertions of the Executive Committee, legislative action was secured, making possible the much needed extension of the breakwater....

After a long interval since the only other previous illumination, the beach, under the auspices of the Executive Committee, was illuminated on the third Saturday evening last August, and the Executive Committee recommend that the third Saturday evening of every August be observed as Illumination Night. The beach residents all worked together to make our village shine and blaze and glitter, and there were many very beautiful and some very elaborate and brilliant displays.

Let everybody remember that the third Saturday evening of August is Illumination Night.

The Executive Committee co-operated this year with the officers of the Playground Association in arranging for a public celebration on the Fourth of July, three of the features of the occasion having been a patriotic address and the reading of the Declaration of Independence at the Casino, by Mr. Arthur P. Cushing, and an Antique and Horrible procession ably marshaled by Mr. Warren M. Hill.

The Executive Committee holds very strongly that owners of automobiles at the beach should have regard to the fact that there are many young children here, and that there is a great deal of travel on roads that are not wide, and that they should operate their cars accordingly - between Garfield Avenue and Glades Gate at not over eight miles an hour.

In the use of automobiles, more, perhaps, than in any other field of present-day activity, there is need to faithfully consider the rights of others. Most of the summer residents at the beach come here to furnish for their families, and to secure for themselves, rest and recreation, under conditions which should be reasonably safe in every respect; and the Executive Committee would like to be able to feel that the children and the other pedestrians in our streets are not in mortal danger from heedless automobilists, and that such of our people as employ horses and carriages for driving purposes are not under constant menace from the over-speeding of reckless chauffeurs.

However earnestly the Executive Committee may seek to advance the interests of the beach, much remains for the members to do as individuals.

We can help, as individuals, to keep the streets and roadsides clean by refraining from throwing paper, boxes, bottles and other rubbish onto the roads and into the wayside bushes. We can each of us be careful about the condition of his own premises. In ways suggested and hinted at, and by whatever other means we may think of, let each one of our community strive to make North Scituate Beach the best kind of a summer home.